This reference to her mother’s youth was not a happy one. Mrs. Barr looked back on her younger days as a period of godless frivolity for which she had largely atoned by enduring with a contrite heart the double affliction of a weak husband and a wilful daughter. Her duty, as she saw it, was to keep Emily and Janet out of the primrose paths which she herself had trodden with such levity and with such disastrous results. Accordingly, Janet’s presumptuous allusion merely stirred her fanaticism to its iciest depths. "You either obey me or go," she said, with pitiless brevity. "Oh, very well," said Janet, affecting a blitheness she was far from feeling, "I’ll go." Without another word, Mrs. Barr, weak as she was, rose and walked with a firm step to her own room. Emily, not altogether pleased with this climax, followed her immediately, giving a flabby imitation of her mother’s really magnificent exit. Janet stood nonplussed for a few seconds. Then she went upstairs to the inward refrain of: "Chewing up a missionary Skin and bones and hymn book, too." Her inveterate evenness of spirit amounted almost to a failing; but now, for the first time, she became conscious of latent impulses of a vindictive and murderous kind. Back in her own room, she hastily packed a suit-case with her most necessary belongings. *CHAPTER TEN* *I* About a week later, a tall, thin, immaculate gentleman, in a suit of neutral taupe, entered the offices of the _Evening Chronicle_. A stand-up collar slightly tip-tilted his chin. But his expression was a friendly, not a haughty one. His small roving gray eyes looked around with a humorous inquisitiveness, as if they wondered what their immaculate owner could possibly hope to find in such a sloppy, disorderly place. In due time, a slovenly office boy stopped pounding on a typewriter and showed the stranger to an inner office. Here Hutchins Burley penned those inimitable effusions on "the ethereal feminine" which gave the Saturday special half a million female and male readers. It was an army that ran the _Saturday Evening Post_ brigade a close second, and rendered Burley’s professional position unassailable. The roving gray eyes saw the swollen bulk of Mr. Hutchins Burley, squatting like a giant toad behind a roll-top desk and pawing over a visiting card. "Well, Mr. Pryor?" said the pillar of the _Evening Chronicle_, with no waste of civility. "What d’you want?" "Frankly, I want Mr. Robert Lloyd’s job." "How do you know it’s vacant? Are you a friend of his?" "Hardly that. The information just drifted my way." "You handed me that stuff at the Outlaws’ Ball. Who the devil are you, anyway?" Whenever Burley spoke vehemently, he shoveled the words from the left side of his mouth, a process that contorted his face into the exact likeness of a cartoon by Briggs.